


Letting You Go

by BlessedMasochist



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: I'm trying something new, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-24 23:00:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22005856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlessedMasochist/pseuds/BlessedMasochist
Summary: I don’t want words, as I’ve said, but I want the city to know the taste of kneeling, to understand with certitude that banality would not be tolerated. I want them to taste my name on their lips, and understand unquestionably that they have been beaten by a man who has known reconciliation at the feet of a king.
Relationships: Oswald Cobblepot/Edward Nygma
Comments: 3
Kudos: 30





	Letting You Go

**Author's Note:**

> I'm trying something new writing-style-wise. A more flowery and illustrative scene from after Oswald kills Galavan in season 2.

He was a man with a mouth made of mockery, a barbed tongue bitter as bad luck, and a throat full of vengeance and wrongs and rust-raw laughter. He was dark-haired, with eyes like the howling sea, absinthal and sharp. He was my throne of sour sentiments and fingerprints and teeth tucked away against the tail of my spine. He was a man of a million ambitions; many months of his respite were hummed by with indulgent conversation, our human hearts, and human lungs beating bent together. 

I remember having rutted against the rise of his hips one eve, spread against the seat of his lap, letting him leave red labyrinths against the line of my thighs with my broken halo bent back in rapture. My kisses caught in the crook of his throat, the symphonic thrum of a pale blue pulse mine to consume. 

When I wrung my hands around his neck, I’d smile to the scream of his heartbeat, and pluck out his silver lies and hangman’s humor. I’d squeeze harder when he’d rip red orchids against my spine and coughed passed a crumpled croon crushed in the curl of my fingers. He tasted like death and hard-won wisdom when I drank of his breath, had my thumb speak circles into the paint-box fingerprints crafted into the column of his neck. I whispered to him phantom philosophies of utopia, and prettier times, and watched him swallow down seas into his shivering lungs. 

We slept strangled in the same sheets and the same skin that eve. 

The morning doesn’t have much to say while it comes in murmuring, sits golden and quiet and warm. I crane, kissing it off the curve of his mouth, warmer still when my thumb counts the heartbeats on his white wrist. 

He’s recovered remarkably well. 

Sin smiles at him with sleepy eyes under the sunlight swimming over our heads. 

Waking hours well spent. 

Good mornings seldom boast better things than the time I spent idling away with him. 

Eden has always tasted red, and this cardinal morning is no exception. Red as roses and ripe as the sunrise. Such hungry things to say. Such hungry things we always are. But I am quiet as I watch the rise and fall of his chest, smile to these sharp and aching thoughts. That eventually he will leave, and be better for it. Never a man to be denied, he would rise above me as surely as he breathes. 

And perhaps Eden still lives in my white throat.

Perhaps it lives with the murmuring things my pulse has to say where it presses up blue and bold and always so patient. Because what a small mercy it is that he hasn’t split open the sound in my throat, the beat behind my lungs, or the glimmer of true humanity, true feeling behind my eyes. 

But still, I know what kneeling tastes like. I know what bitter letters his fingerprints limn across my lips. He speaks to a crown he could have beaten in, waking at last to a pale grey day. 

There is nothing that I must indite here that I’d not sooner indite into the seams of his skin or the line of his lips. Sentimentality is trite, should truth be told. Affections should be delineated along the body by hand, or by mouth, or played upon the heartstrings with whispered words of fealty. Be it at the beginning, at the zenith, at recovery, or anywhere between, before, or after. There is no time to practice what I preach, he has abandoned me for a worthier cause, recompense against those who dared to harm him. 

It has been nearly twenty-four hours since he quit this apartment on a crusade against Theo Galavan. In that time, James Gordon had returned to the precinct with an incredible tale. Oswald Cobblepot had gotten the better of both Barnes and Gordon and had murdered the former mayor in cold blood as vengeance for his deceased mother. 

Only myself, Lucius, and Bullock seemed privy to the knowledge of what had truly transpired inside my apartment, the extrajudicial coup that they had constructed together. 

I was ruminating on the precise legal definition of premeditation when a knock sounded at the door, thundering and urgent. Something akin to tenderness blossomed over my face. With a long quick stride, I nearly overturned a chair and table in my haste to get to the door. To him. 

Trembling hands ripped the door open, the curl of my lip falling as I took in the sight of vengeance victorious: unkempt hair, wet and bedraggled, left hanging limply at odd angles as if the man had slept on a bench or the ground. His beautiful coat, carefully selected for the previous evening’s events, was torn and dirtied, soaked from the Gotham rain. The cadaverous pallor of his cheek was nearly antithetical to the wine-red flush at their departure. 

“Oswald,” I heard myself breathe in relief, chest rising and falling haltingly. I don’t want to speak. For once, there is no desire to dive for words behind my eyes and surface again to gasp them out in something golden or great and terribly, terribly red. Instead, I swept him into the swelter of my body, and there’s nothing steady about the way his body rests against mine. There’s nothing forgiving about the pull of his fingers against the fabric of my shirt, or how with a shuddering exhalation, he has both taken my grievances of abandonment and given me nothing but an acute awareness of true solace. “I was frightened for you,” I admitted against his damp hair once my world had righted itself. 

“Always so kind, old friend,” he replied, clinging to me despite the seeming detachment of his tone.

I inhaled the scent of him, murky and tempestuous. No warmth or spice was left clinging to his skin after foul deeds had been accomplished. 

“I cannot stay,” he murmured, burying the pale of his cheek further against my shoulder.

“But-” 

“It poses too great a risk, Ed, think logically.” 

Acrimony mumbles up too hot, and too heavy in my throat sits against my pulse. A temper always taken out of hand. I’m not proud of anything about the vitriol that’s been dripping in the dark of my mind, or a voice that’s too tight and too thick, and a head that turns fifty thoughts too fast. I take my time, holds myself together by the hands wrung against his ruined coat, and wait. Wait for all the red to be taken away and won’t flinch once while I do so. 

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“The GCPD, Jim Gordon, especially, knows of our...connection. I will be found here.” 

“Is there anything I can give you?” I took the chill of his hand in a firm grasp.

“You’ve already given me everything I needed.” His hand moved to lie on top of mine, but all my hands are thinking about are the pages of my mentor’s chest and the places we could twist a knife in one another, but they do this; they do this, and that’s fine too. “I am whole again because of you, Edward. I can never thank you enough for what you’ve done for me.”

“Nonsense...I…”

“When I get back to firmer footing, I’ll have a place for you to thrive.” Before I forced my tongue to speak, Oswald had made an impressive turn on his heels and stalked down the hall. 

Closer was the word, too, I remember. Closer, I wanted him, closer I should have called him, I didn’t tell a sigh on my mouth to stop when it twisted into something almost too much like a whimper. I didn’t tell my spine not to welcome the wall behind, as the door slammed shut. Too loud, and with too much finality. Nothing, I told myself, would allow Oswald to leave the pages of my heart. My mind, that voice, advising me against letting someone else in, in, and in. Because that’s where I want him, and so I must be clever and cunning to gain what I seek. 

I don’t want words, as I’ve said, but I want the city to know the taste of kneeling, to accept with certitude that banality would not be tolerated. I want them to taste my name on their lips, and understand unquestionably that they have been beaten by a man who has known reconciliation at the feet of a king.


End file.
